Nicholas J. Healy Jr.

“Together with Josef Pieper, Balthasar holds that the major creative achievement of Thomas Aquinas is a vision of reality informed by the metaphysics of creation, understood as God’s generous donation of being.”

“At the heart of the Council’s teaching on the role of bishops is a vision of the Church as a communion centered on Christ’s Eucharist.”

“Through the sacraments, divine love reaches into the heart of matter, allowing created things to participate in God's own life and love.”

“The ‘fundamental polarity’ of self-possession and self-donation together with the unique and unrepeatable identity signified by the term ‘person’ are recapitulated and revealed in the eucharistic self-offering of Christ.”

“To be created in the image of God with a desire to see God is to desire beatitude only in the context of a friendship that is gratuitous.”

“Hierarchical ministry is not delegated or authorized by members of the Church; it is a gift of grace.”

“The idea of the natural order as empty facticity and raw material for technological progress [has] gained a surprising foothold in the mind of many Catholics, who should have known better.”

“In and through the sacraments of the Church, God allows us to participate in his love. We learn to love what he loves and to love in the way that he loves.”

“It is in the Eucharist that the Bride receives a share in the Lord’s ‘traditioning,’ whose unity of completeness and newness, in turn, enables development of doctrine while distinguishing it from arbitrary innovation.”

“The body is not merely inert, pre-moral ‘stuff’ awaiting the intervention of human freedom.”

"Far from diminishing the urgency of the Church's missionary task, a hope for the salvation of all is an invitation to be grasped, wholly and without reserve, by the urgency of the Gospel."

"The deepest wounds in our culture stem from a crisis of faith."

“Understanding the meaning of human existence in light of God’s revelation in Christ opens up a new sense of the idea of freedom in relation to truth as well as a new sense of the distinct integrity of the political order.”

“When he hands over the substance of his life to the Church, Christ communicates a form or a way of life that can include or embrace every aspect of human existence, and ultimately the entire material order of creation.”

“Spousal love involves a total gift of self that, by its very nature, founds a form and is itself a form.”

“ Caritas in veritate conceives the logic of gift not simply as an addition or moral corrective to current economic practice and theory, but as a basis for rethinking the nature of the economy itself.”

“Our natural desire for God entails a renunciation both of self-sufficiency and of demand. To want a gratuitous friendship is also to want to be surprised, and so to refuse to know in advance the actual shape of that gratuity.”

“Catholic patience is the opposite of militant triumphalism. It is a eucharistic love that is willing to wait for the other as long as is needed.”

“The gift that we bring is the reception of the divine self-communication in history by receiving the reality of the world as an expression of trinitarian love—that is, by receiving the world as a gift from God and for God.”